Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is enshrined in the local law of the Hong Kong SAR. For this reason computer-aided clinical TCM practice has become a quest for many people. One of these quests is to retrieve herbs with respect to their temperament and curative effects.
Ontology can be used to organize TCM practice. Ontology is a data model that represents a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. Ontology is used to reason about the objects within that domain.
For example, for a query of Q{x, y) the retrieved result should be a conclusion by inference with the two actual parameters x and y. The process of conclusion by inference is called parsing and the piece of software or computational logic used to achieve this conclusion is referred to as a parser. The combination of “query+semantic net+ontology” is the basis of a telemedicine system, which administers medicine over a network, such as the Internet. Telemedicine refers to administering medicine or medical information over a network that supports wireless and wireline communication. For example, a telemedicine environment may be made up of many mobile and/or stationary clinics that collaborate wirelessly. Each clinic includes a clinical telemedicine diagnosis/prescription system that can be operated by a physician, and a pharmacy. A physician can treat patients locally by using the clinical telemedicine diagnosis/prescription system.
TCM is highlighted here as an illustrative example of a domain that can be represented and accessed via an ontological information retrieval system. The subject invention can also be applied to other domains.